


Around the Bend

by chaineddove



Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-01-25
Updated: 2009-01-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 11:44:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/307536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaineddove/pseuds/chaineddove
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She is no stranger to the call of destiny, though she has never felt it quite so strongly, particularly not from a tour brochure.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Around the Bend

She is no stranger to the call of destiny, though she has never felt it quite so strongly, particularly not from a tour brochure. She is in a youth hostel in central London, just around the corner from Saint Paul’s Cathedral, and absently picks up a brochure someone left on the check-in desk, and there it is, the undeniable tug that says, _yes, there, THERE_. She looks more closely at the glossy paper she is suddenly clutching, printed with rolling green hills dotted with sheep and an old church, and wonders.

Two days later she joins a tour group in Cheltenham, boarding a small bus which carries her north along a winding country road meandering through lushly green hills. She still doesn’t know what she’s doing here, but her heart tells her, _yes_ , and she knows that whatever she’s doing she’s at least doing it in the right direction. They call this place the Romantic Road, she learns, and it is framed with perfect little hedges and speckled with towns and villages and old stone churches, and, as promised by the brochure, flocks of fluffy white sheep. It is May, and England is finally casting off its cool spring weather to bloom around her. London gave her nonstop rain, but here, the sun shines soft and golden through the sparse clouds and the air shimmers with the scent of coming summer and things growing.

She wanders off, as she is apt to do, somewhere around Winchcombe. It seems so simple to leave her bag and strike out past the town into the hills on a path to an unknown destination. She finds a few cottages scattered here and there, then nothing but fields and sheep for a long time, and then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, her path is paved with round stones and she steps into the riotous color of a garden out of a fairy-tale. She doesn’t stop to wonder why there is no wall or what something like this is doing three hours’ walk from anything resembling a road. She simply walks the path to its end as it winds between budding rosebushes. She stops to dip her hand in a fancifully carved fountain shaped like a Chinese dragon — here, of all places — then continues on her way.

She sees the house then, the forbidding gray stone softened by the afternoon light bouncing off the glass of many windows. On a small, round patch of lawn framed by trees, there stands a table with curved legs and four matching chairs. _Yes_ , that strange sense inside her whispers yet again, _here_. She stops at the edge of the clearing in the foliage, and the young boy sitting at the table looks up at her — and she realizes that he isn’t a young boy at all — then says, in perfect Japanese, “I was beginning to fear you had gotten lost.”

“I did,” she says, fighting down an unfamiliar fluttering feeling. “But I ended up exactly where I needed to be, in any case.”

He smiles at her then, and she steps onto the grass and approaches the table. A cat who is not a cat is sitting in one of the chairs, watching her, ignoring the book open before him. A girl who is not a girl appears from the path leading to the house, wearing a summery dress with too many frills and carrying a tray. She sets it down on the table, gives her a long, considering look, then turns her head to follow the passing of a butterfly and runs off after it. The boy who is not a boy says, “Yes, I suppose both of us know that, don’t we?” There are four porcelain cups and gold-rimmed saucers on the table. He takes the teapot and pours a stream of flower-scented green tea that makes her think of home. “You’re in time,” he tells her. “The tea is still warm.” So are his eyes when he looks at her, and so is his hand when it takes hers and guides her to a seat on an embroidered cushion.

“I’m glad,” she says. He is still smiling and this should probably be a great deal more distressing than it is, the garden in the middle of nowhere and people who aren’t what they seem at first glance, but his hand is warm and so are his eyes behind his glasses; she knows him without knowing, and she is not afraid. “It is probably poor manners to be late when meeting one’s destiny.”

He laughs, and he sounds so young, and looks so young, but she knows all the same. Some things have always been simple for her. “My name is Mizuki Kaho,” she tells him, just in case he doesn’t know. Names are tricky, though she knows at least one of his just by looking at him. “What shall I call you?” she asks as a courtesy, and also because some names are best unspoken.

He looks flustered a moment. “I’m sorry. That was rude of me. Seeing you here…” His smile is a little sheepish. “I have been waiting so long I am the one who seems to have forgotten how to be polite. Hiiragizawa Eriol is the name you want.”

She is relieved he has one that is so different from the other. Destiny is one thing, but she doesn’t think she can ever fully reconcile this boy with warm eyes to the ancient magician she has known, in one way or another, ever since she was a little girl. “Eriol,” she says, trying it out, discovering she likes the feel of it. “Thank you,” she smiles, “for inviting me to tea.”


End file.
